So let me backup and explain a little about Mashpit and how it works (you can also read up on the first one):

First, Mashpit is unrelated to Mashup Camp. David Berlind and Doug Gold organized the first one not long ago and will be holding a second soon. Mashpit’s off on its own. 😉

Second, our focus is to stay modest and nimble — the first Mashpit had around 12 participants. Mashpit Dallas I had a similarly small number. We like small teams and keeping ‘pits manageable and high productivity is paramount to running a successful event.

Third, we focus on human problems. Though the context is certainly high tech geekery, we spec out our work as it relates to some human difficulty (i.e. sharing video with a wide audience or sending someone a message over multiple mediums) rather than expressing a problem in tech terms (i.e. “let’s improve the AJAX performance in the Rails stack”). This enables other ‘pits to carry forward the work begun at our event later on, regardless of technology. We want solutions, after all, to be effective in many circumastances. When you’re mashing, it matters less what tools you use than with the quality and how well your solution works for people.

For Mashpit II (II as in the second ‘pit in San Francisco), we’re hoping to get between 12-44 folks (kind of random, but based on space).

Here’s how I’m thinking it should work:

Sign yourself up on the wiki and then add yourself to the Upcoming page (yes, we need a mashup for that!).

Propose human problems that you’d like to work on on the wiki (and yes, you can be thinking about a particular mashup that you want to work on — just don’t describe it from a technology-centric perspective)

Depending on your interest and availability, get yourself to South San Francisco April 15!

We’ll convene, review our options, break out into teams and hack the whole day, reporting back on our progress some time in the evening — documenting everything on the wiki.

…Plan the next event?

Food and other good stuff will be provided — and we’d love to have some sponsors who want to pitch in and maybe provide a meal or snacks or coffee or take care of one of our other needs — drop me email at barcamp -at- gmail dot com and we’ll hook something up. It’s totally great to have a partner like France Telecom R&D supporting us — and it’d be great to have other passionate folks getting behind this too (wherever you are — like Barcamp, Mashpit is free to be copied, immitated and spread far and wide!).